VIDEO PROJECT: jian
by
Rehaan Engineer
"What wish is enacted, what desire is gratified, by the fantasy that real events are properly represented when they can be shown to display the formal coherency of a story? HAYDEN WHITE 'THE CONTENT OF THE FORM'
JIAN. AN OPEN-ENDED VIDEO WORK, CONSISTING OF AN INDEFINITE NUMBER OF SHORT FILMS LINKED BY A SET OF RECURRING CHARACTERS.
The project, as initially conceived in 2001, was a series of 3 linked films that examined centrality and peripherality in formal narrative, simultaneously constituting an extended if somewhat loosely-structured meditation on the fifty-third hexagram of the I Ching ['Advancing'].
However, during the course of shooting and editing, a series of persistent and eventually overpowering centrifugal impulses disrupted the original schema, and discontinuities brought to light through this process prompted a decision to allow the material to splinter into a series of shorter texts, more widely discursive and more tenuously linked, each contributing towards a larger general exploration of the role/s and processes of narrativizing in our lives.
JIAN, re-envisaged as an ongoing work in progress, is an installation piece devoted to the scrutiny of rhetorically constructed narratives of reality and identity.
JIAN currently consists of:
- 1+9=9 [7'59"]
- AFTER APPLEYARD [19'48"]
- CONSANGUINITY! [1'46"]
- DISCUSSING THE DOG [2'18"]
- LISTENING TO MUSIC [12'35"]
- OUT LATE [5'09"]
- WHATEVER/PICKUP [2'28"]
- NADIR FROM 8:04-6 [2'18"]
credits
Rohit Bagai
Nadir Khan
Pushan Kripalani
directed by
Rehaan Engineer
JIAN HAS BEEN INSTALLED AT:
THE PARK HOTEL, BANGALORE
JULY 16, 2005
EXHIBITION: "MET-FEST / MASCULINITIES IN THE CITY"
'THE FOURTH FLOOR', MUMBAI
OCTOBER 8, 2005